TESTAMENT

The TESTAMENT

Preamble

this liscence is a mix of artistic liscence, the mozilla public liscence and my additions (those can be found on www.opensource.org)

The intent of this document is to state the conditions under which a Package may be copied, such that the Copyright Holder maintains some semblance of artistic control over the development of the package, while giving the users of the package the right to use and distribute the Package in a more-or-less customary fashion, plus the right to make reasonable modifications.

This liscence try

to prevent the "artists" from too restrictive limitations,
fix a maintainer succession mechanism that prevent a maintainer to be "ejected"
provide a mutual linkage mechanism with "forkers"

Definitions:

"Package" refers to the collection of files distributed by the Copyright Holder, and derivatives of that collection of files created through textual modification.
"Standard Version" refers to such a Package if it has not been modified, or has been modified in accordance with the wishes of the Copyright Holder.
"Copyright Holder" is whoever is named in the copyright or copyrights for the package.
"Maintainer" is the means each entity that at a certain point of time in charge of coordination
"Contributor" means each entity that creates or contributes to the creation of Modifications.
"You" means an individual or a legal entity exercising rights under, and complying with all of the terms of, this License or a future version of this License. For legal entities, "You" includes any entity which controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with You. For purposes of this definition, "control" means

(a) the power, direct or indirect, to cause the direction or management of such entity, whether by contract or otherwise, or
(b) ownership of fifty percent (50%) or more of the outstanding shares or beneficial ownership of such entity.

"Reasonable copying fee" is whatever you can justify on the basis of media cost, duplication charges, time of people involved, and so on. (You will not be required to justify it to the Copyright Holder, but only to the computing community at large as a market that must bear the fee.)
"Freely Available" means that no fee is charged for the item itself, though there may be fees involved in handling the item. It also means that recipients of the item may redistribute it under the same conditions they received it.
"original author whishes" means a file where the original author has written his whishes concerning the evolution of the software.
"orignal" means the files that you have obtained
"independent CVS" means a system that is able to keep history of modifications on which the maintainer don't have all the rigths (such as file deletion). a good exemple is the sourceforge CVS.
"forkers" means a person/group/legal entity that use 5.c) or 5.a) or 6.a) or 6.c) of this liscence
"end user" a user that use a package build on this work (larger work, the binairies of this package) in short a non developing entity

1. You may make and give away verbatim copies of the source form of the Standard Version of this Package without restriction, provided that you duplicate all of the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.

2. You must include a copy of the original author whishes in the distribution and maintainer may modify it according :

the original text must remain intact
your addition to the text must be easely identifiable as maintainer modification
only the maintainer is allowed to modify this file
the whishes must not prevent the use, and not prevent the software to evolve and not prevent the software from being pulled out the public domain
this file must contain at least the name of the maintainer even if he don't want to make addition to whishes (this is for keeping trace of successive maintainer for 11. )

this ensure that things forgotten by previous maintainer be fixed, while still allowing the maintainers/author to prevent the project of overgrowing. this is to encourage people making small, precise but usable applications/libraries(for exemple a math librairy should not display text).

3. You are strongly encouraged to make additionnal work that complete this package and distribute it on the side of this package,

these packages have no limitations except the one given by their licenses.
these works can be "larger" work, additional functionalities...
in case of larger work you must inform the end user of use of this package

4. You may apply bug fixes, portability fixes and other modifications derived from the Public Domain or from the Copyright Holder.

A Package modified in such a way shall still be considered the Standard Version as_long_these_modification_comply_to_original_author_whishes.
these modifications should be submitted to the maintainer which MUST accept them and include them into the standard version.
the maintainer is responsible of keeping tracks of the modifications

for patch : the patch file must be copied into a directory (this means that the contributor has the work to make it indentifiable has his work if he whish so)
for members of the team that maintain the work : an independent CVS will record the modifications

4.1. The Initial Developer hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license, subject to third party intellectual property claims:

to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicense and distribute the Original Code (or portions thereof) with or without Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work; and
under patents now or hereafter owned or controlled by Initial Developer, to make, have made, use and sell ("Utilize") the Original Code (or portions thereof), but solely to the extent that any such patent is reasonably necessary to enable You to Utilize the Original Code (or portions thereof) and not to any greater extent that may be necessary to Utilize further Modifications or combinations.

4.2. Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license, subject to third party intellectual property claims:

to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicense and distribute the Modifications created by such Contributor (or portions thereof) either on an unmodified basis, with other Modifications, as Covered Code or as part of a Larger Work; and
under patents now or hereafter owned or controlled by Contributor, to Utilize the Contributor Version (or portions thereof), but solely to the extent that any such patent is reasonably necessary to enable You to Utilize the Contributor Version (or portions thereof), and not to any greater extent that may be necessary to Utilize further Modifications or combinations.

5. You may otherwise modify your copy of this Package in any way, provided that you insert a prominent notice in each changed file stating how and when you changed that file, and provided that you do at least ONE of the following:

place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise make them Freely Available, such as by posting said modifications to Usenet or an equivalent medium, or placing the modifications on a major archive site such as ftp.uu.net, or by allowing the Copyright Holder to include your modifications in the Standard Version of the Package. you must inform the maintainer of such modifications.
use the modified Package only within your corporation or organization.
rename any non-standard executables so the names do not conflict with standard executables, which must also be provided, and provide a separate manual page for each non-standard executable that clearly documents how it differs from the Standard Version. the name must use as base name the original name
make other distribution arrangements with the Copyright Holder.

6. You may distribute the programs of this Package in object code or executable form, provided that you do at least ONE of the following:

distribute a Standard Version of the executables and library files, together with instructions (in the manual page or equivalent) on where to get the Standard Version.
accompany the distribution with the machine-readable source of the Packagewith your modifications.
accompany any non-standard executables with their corresponding Standard Version executables, giving the non-standard executables non-standard names, and clearly documenting the differences in manual pages (or equivalent), together with instructions on where to get the Standard Version.
make other distribution arrangements with the Copyright Holder.

7. You may charge a reasonable copying fee for any distribution of this Package.

You may charge any fee you choose for support of this Package.
You may not charge a fee for this Package itself. However, you may distribute this Package in aggregate with other (possibly commercial) programs as part of a larger (possibly commercial) software distribution provided that you do not advertise this Package as a product of your own.

8.The scripts and library files supplied as input to or produced as output from the programs of this Package do not automatically fall under the copyright of this Package, but belong to whomever generated them, and may be sold commercially, and may be aggregated with this Package.

9.subroutines supplied by you and linked into this Package shall not be considered part of this Package.

10. The name of the Copyright Holder may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

11. maintainer succession matter :
some required definitions :

"small projects" means project that contain less than 2000 code lines
"code lines" means sources striped of comments/includes/text destined to be read by a user, configuration/documentation excluded.
"large projects" is the prjects that can't be caracterized as small one
"modification" means addition,removal but not move of source, in case of move followed by a addition/removal the only changes that are taken into account is the addition/removal

you are granted a right to become the maintainer of standard package according :

the old maintainer isn't reachable
the old maintainer can still retake the maintainer title as long as :

the source's code lines hasn't been modified more than 30% on large projects

on small projects there is no limitations

the liscence isn't modified (but still can be completed in a way that the previous maintainer rights aren't decreased)When you become the maintainer you inherit all the project related material (such as websites, forums...)

when maintainer resurection

You must restitute all the rights to previous maintainer (this include website ownership, forums...)
You become automatically team member with rights to influence the way the software will evolve :

each request sumbmitted must be done publicly
they will receive an answer publicly
this answer must contain an explaination why the request as been denied, if denied
this explaination must be based on technical issue (no "I don't like this" allowed)

In all case the mechanism must be performed in a friendly fashion : you are not here to crush each other but to improve the software... remember : you have a common interest in the project! in case of non friendly fashion the "rule breaker" (the maintainer or the old maintainer) will lose all the rights related to this paragraph and can loose it's status however it's strongly recommended to achieve a compromise as it will prevent forks (which are against end-user)

12. forkers related maters
people using 5.a) 5.c) 6.a) 6.C) are called forkers

for the end user sake we must warn it of presence of both parties (so he can make choices with knowledge) for this, the current maintainer of this package and the forkers must provide linkages on their web :

both parties MUST have a link to other part
the link must be visible easely (1 link max from the top of the site)
in case their is no maintainer you should resonably think of taking the maintainership
both parties must inform other of changes related to web hosting.

13. THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES,INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

The End